Report from the London ‘S.O.S.’ tea party on Saturday

Frankly, I can’t believe we had that many, under the circumstances: at points, the rain was blasting down in sheets, and the wind knocked a lot of our stuff around.

After telling us all week that we could use a sound system, the bureaucrats sent out a security guard to tell us we couldn’t (even though we had permission and another, apolitical group was being allowed to use one the next day).

This was the wrong crowd to challenge: half the people there knew what the city’s legal decibel limits were, and who legally “owned” the square we were standing on, etc.

I asked if anyone in the crowd was a status Indian so we could make a treaty challenge. Alas, no luck.

At the end of the day, we just went ahead and used it anyway: first to play “O, Canada” (because it would have been funny getting fined for that), and then to speak.

Naturally, nothing happened. The authorities are 95% talk and no action.

And to those who object that conservatives should be about “law & order”, we are. But we weren’t breaking a law; we had permission and it wasn’t our fault that two overpaid incompetent bureaucrats — whose salaries we were forced to pay — had a poor internal communications system. Second: there is a difference between “law” and “regulation.” Which of the 10 Commandments “your particular group can’t use a P.A. system but other groups can” falls under, I couldn’t tell you…)

I want to thank the Forest City institute once again. This is the third event of theirs I’ve been involved with; once again, they proved themselves to be the most organized, competent and non-neurotic group of people I’ve ever worked with.

By “group of people,” I mean: a single mom with a house full of kids; an Afganistan vet; and a college student I mentioned last week, Andrew Lawton.

I tell people Andrew is “the next Ezra Levant.” He is smart, cheerful, principled, energetic and outspoken.

However, recently Andrew became a conservative activist with a burden Ezra never had to carry.

In April, 20-something Andrew suffered a stroke.

Andrew being Andrew, he hadn’t once mentioned it in his usual torrent of tweets. I had NO idea all through the planning process that he’d been putting it together from a hospital bed.

And his doctors admitted to him that his stroke could have been prevented, but our “wonderful” Canadian health care system dropped the ball.

It’s a long story, except to say doctors didn’t bother looking at his test results until after the stroke, and those tests raised enough red flags that preventative treatment should have been ordered months earlier.

But weren’t. Ooops! Our tax dollars at work.

So Andrew, who recently regained his eye sight and speech, but is still damaged down his right side and has little short term memory, talked his doctors into letting him leave his hospital bed yesterday to oversee the event he’d helped put together.

And he was his usual happy and spirited self.

The sight of a young man obliged to use a walker because some doctors “forgot” to examine his test results was especially poignant given the theme of the rally: that we are paying a whole lot of money to get back a whole lot of nothing.

This is the same young man I told you about before, who has been fighting for so long to bring Ann Coulter to his college campus next spring.

He still needs donations to make sure this very cool event takes place.

“Very cool” because the most generous contributors will get to hang out with Ann and everything!